


Left Open

by shann_13, Sunquistadora



Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Podfic, Podfic & Podficced Works, Podfic Length: 30-45 Minutes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-16
Updated: 2018-09-16
Packaged: 2019-06-22 13:48:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15583323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shann_13/pseuds/shann_13, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunquistadora/pseuds/Sunquistadora
Summary: Mazelinka didn't set out to adopt this twangly, gangly fool.  Ilya is a headache if she's ever met one, and after she makes the mistake of feeding him once, he starts turning up like a bad penny -- in the marketplace, in the South End, in the Red Market, on her doorstep. If she were thirty -- or, well, maybe forty -- years younger, she'd turn him out on his ear before he could make her life difficult. But she isn't...





	Left Open

[Streaming MP3 (right click to download)](http://sunquistadora.parakaproductions.com/LeftOpen.mp3)

Duration: 00:39 | Thanks to Paraka for hosting!

[M4B (right click to download)](http://sunquistadora.parakaproductions.com/LeftOpen.m4b)

 

The first time Mazelinka sees Doctor Jules, it's in the Red Market.  
  
She doesn't know at first who he is, and he doesn't see her, of course.  All his attention is focused on someone else (a mop of hair, curling lamb's-wool white, and splashes of red and violet against more practical linen and homespun).  He follows his disinterested companion as closely as a duckling behind its mother, at first, before being distracted by a stall with bunches of herbs hung upside-down.  He brushes long curious fingers over them, utterly unaware of Mazelinka short and stout and homely beside him, before realizing he's been left behind and flurrying away in a whirl of gangly limbs.  
  
Tesse grumbles to themself as they neaten their bundles of herbs, brushing away fragments of leaf and dropped buds that their visitor had carelessly brushed from the stems in his curiosity.    
  
And Mazelinka admits to a little curiosity in herself -- she rarely sees anyone else from Nevivon this far north, and if that wind instrument isn't a brat from the salt springs she'll buy herself a hat just to eat it.  "Who was that, then?" she asks, indicating with a vague jerk of her head toward the crowd.  
  
"One of the Count's hopefuls," Tesse says, and Mazelinka nods.  Everybody knows about the Count's grand gesture, opening the palace doors to anyone who shows promise at finding a cure for the plague, be it medical or magical.  "He comes down here sometimes, tailing after Asra and making a fine mess."  
  
Mazelinka glances back toward the shifting, sprawling crowd.  In the ordinary course of things, anybody would have melted away from view by now, but she can still see the gawky giraffe a little ways off, his shock of red hair head and shoulders above most.  
  
Well, she thinks.  If she ever wants to find out anything more about this salt-flats boy who's landed himself in the palace, at least he'll be easy to find -- someone like that couldn't hide himself in a crowd if his life depended on it.

* * *

The second time, she's in the South End, trundling home, when she sees that same wild mop of red hair -- this time, ducking carefully through a doorway that's far too short for him before unfolding himself to his full height again.  
  
"No trouble at all," he's saying, and if she'd had any doubts about him being from the old country, they would have been dispelled now by the accent that rolls like river rocks under the current of his voice.  "Just see that splint stays in place for a few days--"  
  
She lingers a little in spite of herself, waiting for the conversation to end.  When he finally turns and proceeds down the street, she waits till he's passing her before saying reprovingly, "Laying it on a little thick, aren't you?"  
  
He catches himself, turning on his heels to face her.  "Madam?" he says.  
  
"Not these days," Mazelinka says dryly.  "The accent. It's too much."  
  
He blinks, registering, and then grins a broad, cocky grin at her.  "There's no such thing," he replies, his speech suddenly leveling out.  
  
Mazelinka grunts and begins walking again, and he falls easily into step beside her, slowing his own strides on those ridiculous legs to match her pace.  "You sound like a community theater actor who's trying to sound like someone from Nevivon."  
  
He laughs out loud at that.  "Maybe I should go audition, then.  I think I'd make a dashing foreign hero, don't you?"  He swirls his overcoat dramatically, still giving Mazelinka that mischievous grin.  
  
"More like the comic sidekick," she grunts.  Then she looks him up and down. "Besides, from what I've heard you already have a part you're trying to play."  
  
"Oh?  Oh!" Recognition dawns on his face.  "Yes, indeed. Doctor Julian Devorak at your service--"  And he actually spins on his heel and flourishes into a sweeping bow.  Mazelinka can't help but roll her eyes. Community theater indeed.  
  
"Julian," she says, and considers.  "I suppose it'll be Ilya, then."  
  
"That's right," he says nonchalantly, though it's belied by the way his eyebrows lift.  
  
"Why change it?" she asks, and pokes him with a corner of her basket.  "And straighten up, you look ridiculous."  
  
"I've learned to always be a little bit foreign," Doctor Ilya Devorak proclaims.  "Just enough to be interesting, just enough to be exotic. It's such a delicate line to tread, but I've found that if you just--"  
  
Mazelinka snorts.  "Ilya was a bit too common for you so you picked out a fancy drawing-room name for yourself, is that it?"  His offended, guilty sputter is answer enough. "You'd better just come along with me."

* * *

It isn't that she's set out to adopt this twangly, gangly fool.  Ilya is a headache if she's ever met one, and after she makes the mistake of feeding him once, he starts turning up like a bad penny -- in the marketplace, in the South End, in the Red Market, on her doorstep.  If she were thirty -- or, well, maybe forty -- years younger, she'd turn him out on his ear before he could make her life difficult. But she isn't, and in spite of herself she's found herself getting used to his chatter, with all his silly jokes and outrageous flirtation.  
  
Maybe that's the problem, maybe he reminds her too much of herself at that age.

Doctor Jules, people call him -- with a sneering lip and a rolling eye, more often than not.  The ones who know him as another palace protégé, anyway. In the South End and the Flooded District, there are people who call him Doctor Devorak now, people who laugh at his clowning and smile at him with gratitude.

“And then, just when I was about to lose my grip, the chief’s three sons appeared over the top of the ridge and-- ackpth!” Ilya cuts himself off with an undignified noise as he trips over a root, sending himself sprawling into the underbrush.

On second thought, she was never like this.  She couldn’t have been.

“All three of them?” she says, dryly, and bends to break off a spray of tiny, furling leaves, adorned with their telltale spots.

Ilya, who presently looks like nothing so much as a bedraggled, offended raven that’s flown into a window, abruptly offers her a wide, sly grin and a cocked eyebrow.  “At the _same time._ ”  He sits up, and his expression melts into genuine interest.  “What’s that one?”

“Cat’s-tail,” Mazelinka says.

Julian considers for a moment, thick brows drawing together.  “I thought those were--” His hands sketch a line in the air. “Tall things.  Grow by rivers and such.”

“Cattails, you’re thinking of.  They’re different.” Mazelinka passes him the sprig of leaves.

“I’m going to write a strongly-worded letter to the herbal naming bureau,” Ilya blatters, but he takes the spray and examines it with keen interest.  “What does this one do?”

Mazelinka turns back to the undergrowth, searching out more of the spotty leaves.  “Good for stress. Panic. Make a tincture with that and put a few drops in a cup of tea, it’ll help people relax, get them to slow down.”

Ilya grins again.  “I’ve seen your tinctures and I don’t think they need the help.”

Mazelinka throws a rattling seed pod at him.  He dodges, but not quick enough, and it glances off his neck.

“A mortal blow!” Ilya gasps, collapsing onto his back with a dramatic sweep of his arm.  “My dearest, my beautiful one, how could you betray me so?” He wriggles in the dirt and fallen leaves a little, probably for effect, although _what_ effect is anybody’s guess.

Mazelinka grunts, trying to hide her amusement and something that feels suspiciously like fondness.  She has a reputation to uphold, or at least the memory of one; she can’t be turning into some tottering old Nevivon grandma now.  “Because I don’t know a herb that’ll _shut you up._ ”

* * *

 Mazelinka frowns thoughtfully.  “You look pale,” she says, in spite of herself.  “And skinny.”

Ilya smiles at her, but there are bags under his eyes, and he’s being more economical with his movement than she’s ever seen him be.  “I’m always pale and skinny.”

She snorts.  “Don’t try to snow _me._  Did you get sick or did one of the Count’s eels get to you?”

Mazelinka is expecting a joke, even a half-hearted one, but Ilya just gives her another wan smile.  “Something between the two, I suppose.” For maybe the first time since she’s met him, Ilya doesn’t say anything more, just drops his eyes in what might be thought or maybe just exhaustion.

She turns with a grumble to her fire.  “You sit there. I’m going to make you some soup.”

“Don’t go to any trouble,” Ilya says.

“Shut up.”

He actually _does_ for a few minutes, and Mazelinka begins to feel a cloud of genuine worry form.

“Mazelinka,” he eventually says, “what do you know about magic?  Anything?”

She pauses, and turns, trying to gauge what he’s really asking her.  He’s absorbed in examining a scratch, running along the breadth of his palm like a life-line, and doesn’t look up to meet her eyes.  When she looks again, she sees swirls of red-tinged light swimming possessively around his hand, wriggling like the vampire eels.

When Ilya looks up, it’s with a crooked attempt at his usual grin.  “To be honest, I never put much stock in it before. Thought it was all--”  He waves a hand, vaguely -- his left hand. His right one stays closed, pulled in protectively against himself.  “All smoke and mirrors.”

“Cat’s-tail,” she says to him, and motions at the jars and pots on the shelf.  “Make yourself useful.” While his back is turned, she pours a measure of sand into the bubbling pot, and watches until the fine golden threads of light suffuse the liquid, glinting like a net.

Ilya brings her the dried leaves, and she crumbles one of those in there too.  “Magic’s like a knife,” she says. “Just a tool, to be used rightly or wrongly.”

“A knife!” Ilya says, and laughs, and his hand curls into a fist -- whether to attack or to protect his bloodied lifeline, Mazelinka can’t guess.  “That sounds just about right.” He whirls away from her, pacing the length of the room in four long, hasty strides, overflowing with a sudden manic energy as if he’s uncorked a bottled filled with hissing, bubbling brew.  “Not like these,” he continues, gesturing at the herbs drying by the window. “Not like this.”

Mazelinka watches him.  “Those are tools too,” she says.

“They’re--” Ilya hesitates, looking from her to the bunches of leaves and stems and flowers with something almost desperate in his eyes.  “They’re not. No. They’re not, Mazelinka.”

She grunts.  “You put too much star-of-morning in someone’s medicine and see what happens.”

“No, but that’s it, don’t you see--”  He nearly bounds across the room, back to her, catching her by the shoulders.  His eyes are wide. “They’re just-- they’re plants. They work in a certain way, they react in a solution, they change the alchemy of the body.  But they don’t do anything on their _own!_ They don’t-- you learn what they do and how to use them and that’s a science, and when you learn it then you know how it works.  When you learn about the _body_ , you learn how it works, how it-- how muscles attach and move and pump and-- it’s not-- it’s _not_ magic.  It isn’t.  It isn’t-- it doesn’t have a mind of its own, it isn’t _cruel._ ”

“Ilya,” Mazelinka says.

He seems to jolt back to himself, and lets go of her, taking a long breath and then another.  Then he offers her a wobbly smile. “Sorry, dear, I-- I got a bit carried away, didn’t I?”

“You got _theatrical_ is what you got,” Mazelinka says firmly, and ladles the soup into a bowl.  “You drink this and go lie down on the bed.”

Ilya takes the bowl from her, and the smile he gives her this time is genuine, despite the clouds still hanging over him.  “You don’t fool me for an instant, you love my theatrics.”

“Keep your filthy slander behind your teeth.”

* * *

 It’s funny, in its way, because she’d been thinking that afternoon at the market that she hadn’t seen him for a while.  Not that she’d been looking for him. Well, not that she’d _need_ to look for him; if Ilya Devorak is inhabiting a space, everybody knows about it before long.  He’ll be laughing too loud, knocking something over, dispensing advice, somehow drawing everyone in around him like a whirlpool as he plays all things to all people.

So it’s funny.  Or rather, it’s not funny at all to see him jolt like a hunted animal when she opens her front door, his arms crossed around himself and his eyes ringed with shadows.

“Ilya,” she says.

“I,” he begins, and then hesitates.  His eyes flicker from point to point, from Mazelinka to the floor, to the fireplace to the cabinet to her again.  She’s never known him to be at a loss for words before. “I, uh. The door was locked, so I-- I came in through the window.”  Mazelinka glances up at the kitchen window, briefly pictures Ilya somehow slithering through it, and that _would_ be funny if he didn’t look so hunted and haunted.

She latches the door behind her.  Ilya swallows, his throat bobbing visibly.  “I. I needed to get away from-- from the palace.  And I couldn’t think-- I didn’t know where else to go.”

Something about the statement strikes her as being heartrendingly sad -- that he makes people laugh, learns their names, heals their scrapes and flus and broken bones, and that he finds himself so alone in spite of it.

“I suppose if the door’s always open to you, the window might as well be too,” she says gruffly, and sets down her basket.  “What’s eating you, then?”

She doesn’t miss how he winces at that, how his shoulders hunch and his eyes dart away from hers again.  “I’ve . . . been having these, these terrible nightmares. About the-- about the plague. How it must feel, having it.  Or, or even just knowing you have it. That moment when you realize.” He smiles, but it’s awful -- tight and unhappy, a skull’s grin.  “You realize you’re going to _die_ because no matter _what_ I do I can’t find a cure-- I can’t-- can’t change _anything_ \--”

“Ilya!” Mazelinka barks, and the sound cuts him off.  He looks at her. She takes a deep breath, and then gazes levelly at him.  “You’re damn near hysterical.” Ilya glances down and away, and she sighs. “You need a quiet night, if nothing else.  I’ll make you some soup.”

He cracks something closer to a smile at that.  “You always say that.”

“It’s always true.”

She lets him take the bed again, the way she always does; she’d tried once to send him down to the smuggler’s hole under her kitchen rug, but she didn’t have the heart to make him stay folded up down there, no matter how funny it was to watch him awkwardly angle his lanky body into the narrow space.

“Mazelinka,” he says, and though his face is slack and his words are quiet with soup and sand and spellwork, his voice is still as anxious as a child going back to sleep after a nightmare.  “I need to--”

“Hush,” she says, and-- gingerly-- puts a hand on his foolish head.  “You need to sleep. You can’t save the whole world by yourself. Let the rest of the Count’s doctors get on with it for a night.”

“I have to,” he insists.  “I have to find the cure-- otherwise all of it, all those terrible things-- all that blood-- it was all for nothing . . .”

She doesn’t know what to say to that.  She has a sudden chilling, bone-rattling thought about what might give a doctor, who’s seen his share of spilled blood just during the course of an evening at the Raven, such screaming horrors.

“You’ll find it,” she says automatically.

Ilya’s eyes are already closing, shadowy and bruised in the candlelight.  He doesn’t answer her.

Mazelinka sits up the whole night to watch over him, and curses herself for a fool the entire time.

* * *

She doesn’t see him again for a while after that.

* * *

In fact, she doesn’t see him at all, at first.  She hears him, in the form of an ungodly crash in her kitchen, and then an ominous silence.  

Reaching for the iron poker, she clambers out of bed and pulls the curtain back, revealing first an indecipherable shadow on her floor that slowly resolves itself, with closing distance and moonlight, into Ilya.  He’s terribly still, and suddenly she’s afraid.

“Mazelinka,” he says hoarsely, and looks up.  In the candlelight, she sees with a chill in her heart that his eye is vivid, bloody crimson.   _He’s come here to die,_ she thinks.

“--dead,” he says hoarsely, pushing himself up on his elbows.  “The Count is dead, burning, it’s burning--”

“All right, Ilya,” Mazelinka tells him, with only the slightest tremor in her hands as she helps steady him.  There are burrs caught on his coat, mud and blades of grass clinging to his boots and his knees, dirt mingling with blood on his hands from where he’d broken the glass in her window--

Blood, but no wounds that she can see.  She turns his hands over, and sees a murderer’s brand etched in stark black.  For a moment, Mazelinka finds herself overwhelmed as she very seldom has in her life, and experiences the sudden certainty that this must surely be some foolish dream she’s having.

The moment passes, and she remains in her kitchen with shattered glass on her floor, plague in Ilya’s eyes, and a murderer’s hand in her own.

“This night just keeps getting better and better,” she grunts, and gets to her feet.

“He’s dead,” Ilya whispers.  “Lucio is dead and the palace is burning . . .”

Mazelinka looks out her shattered window.  Even from here, she’d see the glow of the distant palace on fire.  “No, Ilya,” she says. The plague induces delirium at the end, everyone knows that.  Although -- the thought nags at her -- how had a dying man managed to run to her house, far and away at the south end of the city, all the way from the palace?

Questions she’ll never have answers to.  If the damage has been done at all, it’s been done already, so she grits her teeth and drags his sweaty, shivering carcass to the bed.  Ilya tries to stumble along with her, and the helpless clutch of his hands and his unsteady legs hurt Mazelinka in a way she wouldn’t have really thought they could.

“He promised me,” Ilya whispers.  “He promised me the cure. I saw him.”

“Who did?  The Count?”

Julian laughs at that, a weak, hoarse noise.  “Lucio! He’s . . . burning, burning the plague away . . . raven told me . . . he’s . . . ”

This is cruel, Mazelinka thinks -- that at the end, Ilya is so desperate to cure that he believes he’s found it.  “Yes, yes, the raven told you. All right. Get some sleep. When you wake up,” she forces the words to come out steadily, “you can tell me all about it.”

Ilya tosses and turns while Mazelinka steadily cleans up the shattered glass and scrubs away the blood, douses the flagstones in boiling water, hangs herbs to purify the air.  Her own cynical mind jeers -- if the plague is going to take her, then take her it will. Nobody has ever worked out the rhyme or reason to how it infects people. But there’s no point in taking needless chances, and she’s certainly not about to leave her floor a mess of bloody shards of glass.

And -- she tries to avoid it, but it looms like an iceberg in the dark water of her thoughts -- she doesn’t want to remember Ilya like this.  Not his quicksilver tongue reduced to feverish ranting, not his gray eyes turned glazed and scarlet, not the way his body will crumble as the plague burns him alive from within.  She’d rather recall him fondly, his patter and his gestures and his theatrics--

But in the end, she can’t delay it forever.  She sits by the bedside, and watches as his long limbs slow and then still, his voice fading away on confused babblings about ravens and dungeons and blood.

Finally, in the darkness before dawn, he lies motionless.

And then a sudden white light kindles on his throat, blazing like a star for a moment before it resolves into an intricate mark, and then fades away -- and Ilya takes a deep breath and rolls over, his breathing evening out.

* * *

 Mazelinka waits until the guards are out of sight, and then waits a few minutes more to be certain that they don’t turn back.

Then she stumps into her kitchen and pulls the rug aside, hauls the trapdoor open and hisses down into it, “Just what did you _do?_ ”

Ilya gives her as reproachful a look as he can manage with one red eye and his legs wedged over his head.  “I _told_ you--”

“You don’t remember,” Mazelinka grumbles, and leaves him to extricate himself.  She’s heard all kinds of rumors about what _Doctor Jules_ did on the night of the Masquerade by now -- the gossip is flying about the South End, the Red Market, the docks, everywhere she goes.  Doctor Jules murdered Count Lucio and set the palace ablaze. Doctor Jules murdered Count Lucio _by_ setting him ablaze.  Doctor Jules escaped the dungeons and fled to Draugr, to Nopal, to every corner of the world.  It was a crime of passion -- he was mad with love for the Countess. It was a crime of madness -- he’d caught the plague and had killed in a delirious haze.  It was a crime of revenge -- although for what, nobody can agree.

The only person who _doesn’t_ seem to know what Doctor Jules did and why is Ilya Devorak, who’s currently levering himself out of a smuggler’s hole.

“You could have _warned me,_ ” he complains, “you could have said ‘Ilya, get into the hole, quick,’ and not just _pushed me in there_ , I think my knee was in my ear--”

He trails off, looking away and absently tracing the line of his throat where the mark had appeared.  It’s one of too many things he doesn’t understand -- even his feverish babbling about ravens and cures had met with puzzlement when Mazelinka had asked him about it.  

He seems to believe that someone has cursed him.

 _Who,_ he won’t say.   _Why,_ he also won’t say.  Then again, his memories are so scrambled that it might just be that he really doesn’t know.  

Most curses, Mazelinka had suggested to him, don’t come with memory loss.  Curses usually come packed with the idea that you’ll know exactly who’s done it to you and why.

“Magic,” Ilya had sneered.

She looks at him now, and wonders, and worries.  He seems to sense her, and turns with an artificially bright grin.  “You know, dearest, I really think it’s about time I was moving along.  I can’t have royal guards banging on your door at all hours, can I? Particularly not if it means you’ll be cramming me under the floor like that.”

“And go where?” Mazelinka asks brusquely.  “Talk sense for once.”

“I . . . mean it,” Ilya says, letting the showy smile drop.  “We’ve worked out that you’re not in danger of contracting the plague from me -- fine.  But you _are_ in danger as long as I stay here, Mazelinka.  Plenty of people know I’ve gone squiring you around, even the palace has put two and two together.  Eventually they’re going to search the place, and if they find me with you--”

Mazelinka huffs.  “Nobody _knows_ if you’re guilty.  Even _you_ don’t know.”  Ilya only watches her, and she feels herself offering justifications, as she never does.  “Don’t you want to find out what happened to you? How this magic mark of yours works? Who put it there?  How do you expect to find that out if you’re off gallivanting around, _enjoying_ yourself?”

Ilya laughs at that, though it doesn’t quite touch his eyes.  “I’m sure I’ll have plenty of opportunities to find out how it works.  As for who put it there and why . . .” His smile slips a little, not quite disappearing, but hanging crooked on his face.  “If the things I _do_ remember are anything to go by-- maybe it’s just as well if I forget the rest.”

“You don’t even know the truth,” is the only think Mazelinka can think of left to say.

He shrugs.  “To be perfectly honest with you, dear, I think I can come to terms with not knowing.”

There’s something in his face that suggests he needs to escape -- and perhaps it’s not the presence of palace guards that’s weighing on him.  She sighs, and sinks onto a stool. If she can’t help him here, perhaps she knows someone somewhere else who can. “Where will you go?”

He shrugs.  “Probably best not to stay in any one place for too long -- at least for a while.  But there are plenty of places to go -- Nopal, Milova, Draugr, Prakra . . .” The cheeky grin returns.  “Surely you remember skipping from port to port? I daresay it’ll be the adventure of a lifetime.”

Adventure _for_ a lifetime, Mazelinka doesn’t say, because it sounds too much like a life sentence in her head and not like the thrilling prospect he’s trying to convince himself it’ll be.  “Well, if the rumors are going around that you’ve fled to every port city anyone can think of, you might as well earn them.” She rubs her chin and looks at him speculatively.  “But we’ll have to do something about that eye first.”

* * *

The Count would howl if he knew how fast the city went back to normal.

Oh, there are the periodic proclamations about his tragic loss -- and from time to time, a notice about Julian Devorak flutters forlornly in the breeze -- but Vesuvia recovers so swiftly that it’s as if the Count never came.  The plague seems to dry up overnight, and most people seem to feel like it all came out about even. Lucio’s courtiers still rule the city, with no more change than the Countess’ name at the top of their proclamations than the Count’s.  As for the Countess herself, nobody ever sees her; but then again, nobody ever saw her before the fatal Masquerade anyway. Some people whisper that Lucio locked her in a tower, others say that she was killed too (by the doctor, by the count, by the courtiers, by the flames) and her officials simply haven’t told anybody.  It hardly seems like it’d matter, either way.

As for the infamous Doctor Jules -- once the initial furor dies down, most people don’t seem to think of him one way or the other.  And why should they? Life hadn’t much changed, really; the Masquerades were forgotten as easily as they’d been embraced, and in the meantime Vesuvia rebuilds and recollects and carries on.

Away on the far side of town, where the palace casts only a distant shadow, some people even laugh and raise their drink to the Doctor -- some because they had no love for Lucio’s opulence while their own streets are flooded and overgrown, some just because they admire a rogue, even a murderous one, who got away with it.  A few here and there even remember him, splinting or bandaging them with easy patter and payment waved away.

Doctor Jules, along with the Count, has become a stock figure in the street plays -- a glib, sinister fellow in black who invariably plays up the audience, and whose dastardly deed inevitably gets a cheer.  Sometimes Mazelinka thinks it’s almost a pity he’s not around to see it all -- he’d probably enjoy it. Given half a chance, he’d probably leap onto the stage to play himself, all gloating laughter and flourishing black capes.

She trundles home from the market with the curious feeling that he’ll step out of a doorway just ahead of her, or turn a corner and greet her with a sweeping, theatrical bow.  Even when she gets home, she can’t shake the feeling that he’ll be there, puttering sleepily around in her kitchen. It . . . isn’t painful, exactly, so much as lonely -- and all the more so for how ridiculous it is.  It’s been more than a year, after all; and she’s no wistful grandmother with a runaway boy.

Ah, well.  She’s not likely to ever come home and see her window swinging wide open again.

**Author's Note:**

> Podficcer notes:  
> Cover art picture is official art from thearcanagame.tumblr.com
> 
> Eternal thanks to Shann/Ribbonsandstars for dragging me into this fandom and letting me drag her in turn into pod_together! <3
> 
> I hope my accent isn't too terrible! I got halfway through a full Julian accent version before deciding it wasn't consistent enough, but if anyone wants one I'll go through and finish that version too.


End file.
